Cocktail of the Day

The author of that seminal work, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, David Augustus Embury was born on this day in 1886 in Pine Woods, upstate New York.

No matter that this high-flying tax lawyer never worked behind a bar in his life: his experience, he remarked, was "entirely as a consumer and as a shaker-upper of drinks for the delectation of my guests". His home bar was an edifice many saloons would have envied.

He was a sociable chap, whose career success was partly down to his ability to draw in new clientele. Embury's 1948 volume would become a bible for 1950s middle-class entertaining and his knowledge of cocktail origins, theories of flavour, and his lucid, almost scientific approach to recipes make his book an essential resource for professional bartenders even now.

Today we're raising an Army & Navy to David Embury, whose 1948 The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks contains the cocktail's first known published recipe.